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Saturday, 31 October 2015

Multilinguals are quite ordinary people. Not only do they outnumber monolinguals, worldwide, they’ve also been around for quite a while and they’re all over the place. Why is it, then, that specialist and lay outlooks alike continue to associate multilingualism with loaded words such as ‘challenge’, ‘complexity’, ‘(super)diversity’, ‘cost’, ‘benefit’, and to collocate the word with vocabulary evoking deviation, like ‘special’ or ‘exceptional’?

I can think of one reason: we’ve somehow lost track of the meaning of the word multilingualism to designate the status of being multilingual, as in the title of this blog, although there is no multilingualism without multilinguals. The result has been that multilingualism, like other -isms before it, acquired a life of its own, whereby we feel free to talk about it without needing to refer to the people that it supposedly describes. Simply using the word, for example, is nowadays a must, in ways that sometimes remind of the reverential tributes we feel we ought to pay to things that we do not really understand, -isms included. The abstract of Hervé Adami and Virginie André’s recent book, De l’idéologie monolingue à la doxa plurilingue: regards pluridisciplinaires, precisely captures the current awed stance about multilingualism, of which this excerpt is worth quoting in full:

Cult objects tend to develop (evil? benevolent? mysterious?) strangleholds on us common mortals, making us do things and be things that we’re powerless to control. Multilingualism does or doesn’t do this and that to us, ought to be something but mustn’t be the other, we should and should not, can and cannot do so much or so little about it – is this what being multilingual is all about? Do we really want to go on stockpiling opinions about multilingualism until this -ism fadinevitably burns itself out and the next one enters the stage?

Or do we want to start dealing with multilingualism for what it factually is, the natural linguistic state of over half of humankind, across time and space? This means start dealing with people, not words, because multilingualism is about multilinguals. It means start looking at what multilinguals do, how they do it and why, to find out what’s going on, not what we’ve been told must be going on. It means focusing away from two myths which have compounded the purported intractability of multilingualism.

First, the myth that monolingualism is an unquestionable norm of linguistic behaviour, as Liz Ellis was among the first to question in a collection titled Monolingualism. Monolinguals use their single language for all purposes, with all people, at all times. This is not what multilinguals do, whether with all their languages or just one of them. The only similarity between multilinguals and monolinguals is that all of us go about our daily business making use of our full linguistic repertoires.

Second, the myth that observing the languages of multilinguals means observing multilingualism. What we call ‘languages’ exist only in our collective imagination. What we call ‘features of languages’ exist only in linguistic theories – all of which are monolingual-based, by the way. In a collection of essays edited by Anwar S. Dil and titled The Ecology of Language, Einar Haugen reminded us that “[t]he concept of a language as a rigid, monolithic structure is false, even if it has proved to be a useful fiction in the development of linguistics” and that “[a language] has no life of its own apart from those who use it”.

Languages are tools that we create, develop and mould to serve us. They’re not straitjackets to which users must accommodate, a misconception which isn’t exclusive to research on multilingualism but which continues to shape this research. Languages aren’t there to be reproduced and respected as-is, because language users aren’t language curators.

Language users interact with their environment, their linguistic environment included. They are the real-life people that we parents, teachers, clinicians, encounter in our everyday lives, whose real-life language needs we feed, and whose real-life language uses feed back into our own. Language users are, in short, what we need to address. I’ll do that in the next couple of posts, dealing with home, school and clinical environments.

Saturday, 3 October 2015

What, exactly, do we mean by the label
‘multilingual’? I don’t mean dictionary-sanctioned definitions
of the word, nor what the word should mean according to more or less
entitled opinions, I mean what linguists mean when we talk about word
meanings: what does the observation of uses of the word
‘multilingual’ tell us about its meaning? In order to find out,
we can do what linguists do, which is to collate a sample of contexts
where we find the words that interest us.

We observe, first, that ‘multilingual’
appears in contexts such as “... bilingual and/or multilingual
...”, implying a core distinction between two and more than two
languages. The dichotomy, however, seems exclusive to bi- vs.
multi-, in that we don’t find contexts such as “trilingual
and/or multilingual”, “quadrilingual and/or multilingual”, and
so on. The reason might well be that two languages were long thought
to be the crowning achievement
of human linguistic ability. Evidence of this belief lingers on in
our current terminology, where we still talk about SLA (Second
Language Acquisition) to refer to any number of languages learned
beyond our native ones, or about L1 to refer to a (single) language
learned from birth, the assumption here being that there must be some
L2 politely waiting in line to become part of one’s linguistic
repertoire. Habitual use of cardinal/ordinal 2-related words in these
contexts, lacking relationship to the meaning of ‘2’,
explains why the word bilingual has come to mean ‘more than
one language’ or ‘two or more languages’. Which is rather
confusing, to say the least: just imagine using words like bifocal
or bilateral to refer to ‘two or more’ focal lengths or
sides, respectively. This is why I prefer multi-words
to refer to ‘more than one’.

We observe, second, that the word
‘multilingual’ collocates with family, school,
clinic, on the one hand, and with child, teacher,
clinician, on the other. This sample shows that the word is
used as a qualifier (we could call it an adjective) of another word
(a noun). The same goes for contexts like The family/child/ ... is
multilingual. More uncommon are collocations such as A
multilingual is ..., multilinguals are ...,
or a/the multilingual., where a final stop follows the word: I
am / They are multilingual is sanctioned by use, but I am a
multilingual / They are multilinguals apparently isn’t. Not all
that long ago I had to add the plural form multilinguals to
the dictionary in my word processor, which kept marking it with a
no-no wavy red line. We’re not comfortable using this word as a
noun – yet: it could well be only a matter of time for
multilingual/multilinguals to become as noun-worthy as
bilingual/bilinguals, given that our attention to
non-monolinguals dates from quite recently.

A third observation is that when we’re
talking about, say, multilingual schools and multilingual teachers,
we’re talking about two different multilingualisms – and yes, my
word processor also had issues with this plural. A multilingual T,
including families, schools, clinics, countries, environments, is a
T(hing) where more than one language is used, whereas a multilingual
P, including children, parents, teachers, clinicians, individuals, is
a P(erson) who uses more than one language. This is not splitting
hairs: the verbal form “is used” indicates a passive
construction, probably familiar from school textbooks
in interesting sentences like The bone is eaten by the dog. In
language textbooks, the by-phrase is always there, because the
purpose of textbook passives is to teach that they must match an
active counterpart, in this case The dog eats the bone.
Language students apparently need not be taught that we use passives
precisely to be able to ignore the by-phrase, either because
we have no idea who is actively doing the action represented by the
verb, or because we prefer not to say. Exactly as when we define,
say, a multilingual school as a school where more than one language
is used. By whom? We don’t know.

What we do know is that families or
schools, being institutional abstractions, can’t ‘use’
languages: people can. We also know that when we say that a
school or a country ‘has’ more than one language, we’re using
metaphor.
Schools and countries can’t own anything, except metaphorically:
people can. Which means that talking about, say, multilingual
environments is not the same as talking about multilinguals: a
multilingual environment is one where different languages are
involved, but not necessarily multilingual people. Multilingual environments can feature monolinguals, as in
multilingual schools or clinics where the students or clients are
multilingual whereas the staff are not, and that’s why multilingual
signs exist for the benefit of those who use only one of the
languages in them.

Failure to realise that multilingualism
has to do with *multilinguals*
explains the obsession with the languages of a multilingual
that has characterised specialist and lay quests into
multilingualism. We select multilinguals’ vocabulary sizes,
accents, grammar, pragmatic proficiency, for comparison with
monolinguals’, to ascertain the presumed state of health, or
integrity,
or wholeness,
of multilinguals’ languages, apparently expecting to find the key
to multilingualism in the languages themselves. A bit like saying
that the key to Maria João Pires’ performance lies in
her pianos. We’ve even started comparing trilinguals to bilinguals,
those not-so-exciting-any-more language geniuses of yore, and I’m
sure the day will come when we’ll compare octalinguals to
heptalinguals, to find out... What, exactly? I wonder, too. This way
of looking at multilingualism takes it as a property of languages,
which is clearly nonsensical. Languages can’t be multilingual:
people can.

If we want to understand
what being ‘multilingual’ means, we need to shift our focus from
the languages to the language users. Only then can we stop asking
useless questions about what different languages do to people
and start asking relevant questions about what people do with
different languages. Next time, I’ll try to work out what this
means.

Saturday, 5 September 2015

Norms of conduct, including linguistic norms, are social constructs. They vary in space and time, and they can be of two types. Descriptive norms draw on observation and tell us what people do, for example that interrupting your conversation partners is common in parts of southern Europe (which can be a sign of polite engagement in the exchange), or that fermented herring is a delicacy in parts of northern Europe (which can be a sign of Nordic stoicism). Prescriptive norms draw on judgement and tell us what people should do, for example that we must respect our elders’ conversational turns, or abstain from consuming fermented food in the presence of sensitive noses.

Norms are useful constructs because they help us regulate our behaviour among fellow human beings – although it remains entirely up to us to choose, say, to be a Roman in Rome, or to insist that only Romans should be heard in Rome. Norms are useful also because they underpin comparative analyses which can help us decide what isn’t normal, and act upon that decision. On one condition: that we know what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about norms.

Taking descriptive norms to apply to populations beyond those which supplied the norming standard is a telling sign that we have no idea what we’re talking about: for example, assuming that all Europeans enjoy fermented fish meals. Another is confusing descriptive and prescriptive norms: for example, insisting that we should never interrupt people. Unfortunately, both signs are richly documented in our ways of dealing with multilingualism.

Descriptions of linguistic behaviour that apply to monolinguals because they were normed for monolinguals have arbitrarily, though routinely, been generalised to multilingual behaviour. They provide the benchmarks through which we assess multilinguals, on grounds that would make us cringe if our reasoning hadn’t become so dulled by their familiarity.

When we select multilinguals for comparison with (experimental) populations containing no multilinguals, while never giving a thought to performing comparisons the other way around, we’re doing two things. One, we’re saying that monolingualism is a useful and unquestionable linguistic norm from which to draw useful and unquestionable conclusions about non-monolingual behaviour; and two, we’re singling out multilingualism as the reason for the comparison, thereby self-fulfilling the prophecy that multilingualism is a deviation from those norms. What else could we expect to find from these comparisons, really?? Such practices turn multilinguals into the platypuses of lingualism: they’re funny not because they are funny, but because the norms guiding our taxonomies are. Interrupting people and basking in fermented herring are also deviations from some norm.

Respectable academic publications have indeed taught us that multilingualism is deviant. Only in the last two decades, they have featured, say, the linguistic development of multilingual children alongside linguistic development in clinical conditions such as deafness, blindness, autism, prematurity, specific language impairment and genetic disorders, or socioeconomic conditions such as extreme poverty, under headings titled varieties of development, or development in exceptional circumstances. The thinly veiled political correctness of the italicised words in fact sanctions multilingual development as atypically other. My articles ‘First language acquisition and teaching’ and ‘Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children’ give an overview of these matters.

Conclusions sanctioned by authoritative reports such as these expectedly lead parents and educators to take multilingualism as a disorder, best addressed by specialists.

Mistaking observed norms for prescriptions, in turn, is the natural consequence of our ignorance that descriptive norms, in the plural, must be established for every normal population. A norm describing us, here and now, cannot apply to them, elsewhere and evermore. The dearth of descriptions of multilingual normality explains that discussions about multilinguals concern not what they do, but what they should do, according to monolingual standards. This is why recommended behaviour for multilinguals invariably targets the elimination of multilingualism itself, in the same way that we’d do well to eradicate other pathogenic agents.

To me, the issue is that laypeople and specialists alike seem to have great difficulty understanding that difference is not synonymous with deviation, and this is why we go on maltreating differences. Add to this the misconception that multilingualism has more to do with languages than with the people who use them, and we have the perfect recipe counting multilingualism as an ingredient of clinical conditions: we remain persuaded that multilingualism is about what languages can do to people, instead of what people can do with languages.

Multilingualism is *not* a disorder. Neither does it cause, avoid, worsen, or repair disorders, because it doesn’t even correlate with disorders of any kind. One of the reasons for the widespread belief that it is and it does relates, no doubt, to our additional difficulty in providing precise definitions for the terms that we use. What, exactly, do we mean by the label ‘multilingual’? I turn to this next.

Saturday, 8 August 2015

Since the 2008 election of
President Obama in the United States of America, we are increasingly
told that we are witnessing the end of racism. I would argue, on the
contrary, that racism is still all-pervasive but that it has been
normalized.

Racism has become such a
part of everyday common sense that we often do not even notice it any
longer. We do notice it at certain times, as when in Europe and
elsewhere, Far Right parties score electoral victories, with
increasing numbers of people voting for them and their elected
representatives sitting in the European Parliament, or in national
parliaments and local communes, whether in Austria, France, Greece,
Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, or many other
countries.

It is easy, at times like
this, to construct those who vote for such parties as the racists and
us, by implication, as non-racist. In fact, however, these seemingly
opposed views actually exist on a continuum, on which it is easy to
slide from softer to harder forms of racism. None of us is immune
from racist views and in particular the language racist views that
our Western societies are steeped in. Language racism refers to the
manifold ways in which language is increasingly used nowadays as a
proxy for race in order to exclude people.

Before I discuss some
examples, there are two important points that we need to keep in mind
about racism. First, racism is not only cognitive but also structural
and institutional. Racism is not just a matter of individual beliefs,
which can be abolished by changing these beliefs. There are also
structures and institutions that are bolstered by the racial ideology
and that help to maintain and reproduce racial privilege and
inequality. Secondly, the biological racism built around a
distinction between superior and inferior races has nowadays
metamorphosed into a cultural racism focused on cultural differences,
which can be linguistic, religious, etc. In this way, many racial
discriminations are also about religion, language, social class or
gender. The point is precisely that different types of discrimination
overlap, and that race, class, gender, religion and language issues
intersect in all sorts of ways.

However, mainstream
contemporary discourses are marked by what is usually referred to as
‘colour-blind racism’, which consists in the denial (or erasure)
of race and racism. An illustration of this would be the August 2014
events in Ferguson, Missouri, a small town located within the
metropolitan area of St Louis. Long-standing spatial, economic and
cultural segregation in Ferguson has involved a high level of
distrust between the largely black community and the mostly white
police force, which culminated in the shooting of unarmed black
teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on 9
August 2014, which in turn sparked off massive protests on the
streets of Ferguson and all over the USA.

One widely reported
comment after this tragic event was that of the white Republican
mayor of Ferguson, who insisted that we need to ‘blame poverty, not
race’ (Guardian, 23-08-2014).
In this way, he attempted to shift the blame away from white
supremacy and the structural racism of the social system, and upon
poor people, who could then be looked upon as responsible for their
own poverty. Thus the erasure of race and racism involves a number of
factors:

an emphatic assertion
that we, or a particular individual (Darren Wilson), are not racist;

an inability – or
unwillingness – to see the wider picture of structural racism in
the social system;

a mistaken belief in the
one factor that explains it all: ‘it’s about poverty, not race’.

Language racism works in a
similar way. A recent example of it occurred in Luxembourg, the
country where I live and work. Luxembourg is a highly multilingual
country, with three officially recognized languages (Luxembourgish,
French and German). It has a high number of foreign residents
(45.3%), with the largest immigrant community being the Portuguese.
Many foreign residents speak French (as well as other Romance
languages such as Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Cape
Verdean Creole). As a result, French, which used to be the
language of prestige and of the educated elite, has now become
associated with migrants and is being viewed in an increasingly
negative light
by many locals. They fear that the rapid spread of French may
endanger the small Luxembourgish language and, concomitantly, the
Luxembourgish ‘nation’
itself.

On 7 June 2015, the Luxembourgish citizens were asked in a referendum to
decide for or against extending the right of vote in legislative
elections to foreign residents. The government campaigned in favour
of a ‘yes’ vote, as a way of reducing the ‘democratic deficit’
in Luxembourg, where only about half of the population are allowed to
vote in legislative elections. However, the motion was rejected by
78% of the voters. In the aftermath of the referendum, many of these
‘no’ voters felt the need to defend themselves against possible
charges of xenophobia and racism, by arguing (in online comments,
letters to the editor, etc.) that theirs was not a vote against
foreigners but against the French language. In the following letter
to the editor, for example, it is claimed that the sole aim of the
‘no’ voters was to defend the Luxembourgish language against an
encroachment by French:

The
80% against voting rights for foreigners is not a vote against
foreigners. It was a vote against the further ‘Frenchification’
of the country … That proves: we are not hostile to foreigners.
(Luxemburger Wort, 17-06-2015)

Here we have another
instantiation of the ‘denial of racism’ strategy (‘it’s about
language, not race’), and we are reminded that multilingualism does
not automatically tally with tolerance and open-mindedness. Even more
worryingly, this form of language racism underlies widespread
societal discourses which are ostensibly about language but are often
tied up in more complicated anxieties about race, for example the
politics of integration in Europe and the English Only movement in
the United States. Anybody interested in this topic will find further
examples and analyses in my new book Language Racism.

Saturday, 11 July 2015

Wanting to learn a language doesn’t always result in learning the language that we want. This is so even when the language that we want to learn and the one that we end up learning go by the same name – let’s call it X. One reason for this is that most language teaching proceeds through what we’ve come to identify as the language’s holy writ, namely, the X textbook.

A textbook is a book. Like all books, it uses printed modes of language, with two consequences: first, that textbooks can’t serve those of us who wish to learn to speak X, because spellings do *not* represent actual speech. The printed nature of textbook languages is what explains, among other things, the proverbial failure of X learners to acquire X-like accents – for which the learners are conveniently blamed, by the way. Is it any wonder that accents learned through print remain print-like?? The second consequence is that only those of us who are literate can access textbooks. This includes e-books and other e-novelties in written form, in that technological innovations seem to have had no noticeable effect on pedagogical innovation.

Lärobok i tyska språket (1858)

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

A textbook is also a grammar of X. Rather than real-life X, it offers boring, trite, irrelevant, at worst embarrassing, at best infantile examples of dialogues (sentences, situations, narratives, descriptions) for learners to memorise and/or enact, which are tailor-made for the sole purpose of introducing points of X grammar. The etymological relationship of the word grammar to printed modes of language is the likely reason behind this strange pedagogy. The facts are that we’ve been teaching languages in this way since the Ancient Greeks.

A textbook is, further, a preview of things to come, namely, its twin sidekicks tests and exams, also holy writ. Textbooks contain the correct answers that we learners will need to provide to printed assessment questions, in order to have our learning of X certified, also in print. The teaching-to-the-test nature of language textbooks is what explains that certified X learners can’t use X. On my first visit to an English-speaking country, Britain, I brought along nine solid years of enviable marks in my school English. As soon as I landed, I realised that I could both describe the past perfect continuous and declaim perfectly grammatical sentences like ‘My sister’s bookcase is taller than mine’ to anyone who would listen (no one would), but that I couldn’t order a snack or communicate with bus drivers, receptionists, or anyone else in sight. I had no idea what language they were speaking over there, I’d never heard it before. Or seen it, for that matter: brochures, placards, newspaper articles, were as unintelligible to me. And I won’t bore you with what happened in my later encounters with this ‘same’ X in places like India, Hong Kong, Australia or Singapore, for example.

A textbook is, finally, a publication. Like all publications, textbooks have editions, copyrights, publishers, distributors, marketers, advertisers, sellers, prices, and they are dated, in both senses of this word. They also have authors who, in the case of language textbooks, are often monolingual. What language textbooks seem to lack is a specific readership. Since the ideal publication must appeal to ‘any’ consumers, they’re invariably geared to “anyone seeking to improve their X”, or “X learners from any language background”. The problem is that one-size-fits-all language products fail to serve any consumers, for the simple reason that real life is anything but one-size-fits-all: language users, in real-life times and real-life places, are what makes up any X.

This is also why textbook languages allow no room for learners’ engagement with them, to make them theirs by building the common ground that using a language means, not least where accents are concerned. You need to follow the book: questioning (textbook contents, methods or goals) and thinking (about alternative language uses and how they might work), which define healthy learning, are discouraged as a waste of precious time needed to prepare for almighty assessment pieces.

I see no reason why we should remain in awe of the magic of printed symbols and go on teaching languages the way we were taught. No reason, in fact, to let any one-size-fits-all standard symbology constrain our engagement with people and their languages. This seems to be common practice in clinical settings, for example, and I’ll come back to this specific issue very soon. Meanwhile, the next post, authored by a guest whom I’m delighted to welcome to this blog for the second time, offers broader reasons for ways in which we currently engage with fellow human beings.

Forman, R. (2014). How local teachers respond to the culture and language of a global English as a Foreign Language textbook. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27 (1), 72-88. DOI: 10.1080/07908318.2013.868473

Saturday, 13 June 2015

In case you’re wondering, let me reassure you straight away that yes, the title of this post is meant to be sarcastic. Perfect multilinguals do exist, of course, though only in the minds of those of us who mistake ideals of perfection for reality.

Multilingual perfection awardees must satisfy a number of criteria. If you are, or were, a language learner as an adult, forget it: not having acquired all of your languages as a young child automatically makes you a non-multilingual. Either your accent, or your choice of words, your delivery, proficiency, fluency, grammar, conversational skills, in one or more of your languages, or your physical appearance, or all of the above, won’t pass the perfection litmus test, which is a match to native(-like) standards. This is an intriguing criterion, because it assumes that we know what native users are, look like, and do with their languages. I recently came across a very entertaining report in Nature, about the woes of having articles submitted to journals anonymously peer reviewed in order to assess their scholarly quality, where I found this gem: “Another reviewer suggested that the [article] authors should find ‘someone who speaks English as a first language to proofread the paper’, even though all four authors – including two tenured professors – were native English speakers.”

If, on the other hand, you’re a child acquiring your languages from birth, you may stand slightly higher up the qualifying ladder. But only slightly, because even though you might technically qualify as a native multilingual, there have been studies on such children reporting on their foreign accent in one or more of their languages, numbering their languages L1, L2, Ln to suggest sequential language learning, or arguing that one of their languages is dominant across an often unspecified board. As a young child, you are also bound to fail the LSRW condition, stipulating that being multilingual means proficiency in Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing all of your languages. This acronymic criterion does two things: first, it disregards all of us for whom language use involves neither listening nor speaking; and second, it adds the ‘RW’ twist, drawing on the well-attested confusion between languages and their printed counterparts. If I read and write Latin, but don’t speak it, am I multilingual with Latin? If I’m a native user of Singlish, but never wrote anything in it, am I multilingual with Singlish? Fascinating questions, and fascinating criterion, because it means that young multilinguals, as well as multilinguals who are illiterate, or happen to use one or more of the vast majority of the world’s languages which lack printed versions, aren’t perfect multilinguals either.

So who is? The issue is not so much that defining multilinguals looks pretty much like an exercise in shooting at a moving target: every time you think you’ve answered a question, about yourself or others (Am I multilingual? Are you?), you find that the question has changed. The issue is that the perfect multilingual matches the mythical being that I’ve called multi-monolingual and that can be represented like this:

Instead of taking seriously claims about multilingualism which make no sense at all, let’s leave the sarcastic mood and take a serious look at what these criteria imply: they say that there are perfect, and therefore imperfect, uses of language, which means that those uses are best judged rather than observed. They say that living up to language standards is what steers our language uses, which means that languages exist independently of their users. And they compound the myth that being multilingual means being lesser lingual. There is one good reason why questions about the perfect (real, proper, true, etc.) monolingual aren’t ever asked: they would just make us laugh. Which monolingual has perfect command of their single language, according to the criteria that should define a perfect multilingual?

Real-life multilinguals are as linguistically perfect as their monolingual counterparts. All of us draw on all of the linguistic resources at our disposal in space and time, whether we label these resources mono- or multi-. And all of us are fair game for judgement and deprecation according to someone else’s and, not least, our own ideals of perfection.

The questions that make sense aren’t about linguistic perfection, they’re about why claims of linguistic perfection go on being made. Asking these questions is important also because the mix of ingredients in funny criteria purporting to define multilingualism carries over to funny methods that we go on using to teach and assess those who are (becoming) multilingual in school. I turn to this next.

Saturday, 16 May 2015

Research on multilingualism has mushroomed over the past 50 years or so, which must be a good thing. Although some publications do take multilingual norms as multilingual norms, most research has proceeded through the bias of monolingual standards, which is not so good for the obvious reason that multilinguals aren’t monolinguals. Equally biased is the academic and media hype spawned by the flurry of interest in current multilingualism, which risks spawning, in turn, the belief that multilingualism is newsworthy not because this interest is new, but because multilingualism itself is new.

Multilingualism may indeed strike as novel those of us who go through life lacking everyday access to, and need for, other languages than the single one we were born and bred into, or for whom learning a new language has become more or less synonymous with learning ‘our’ language. Research such as Herbert Schendl’s, specifically on English in the Middle Ages, tells quite a different story.

English is a relevant example because, in addition to its current favoured status both as object and medium of discussions of multilingualism, it has paradoxically been marketed as a desirable, single common denominator to users of any other languages, complete with a misleading aura of stable uniformity across space and time. The word English features in time-honoured acronyms like EFL, ESL, ESOL (and a whole host of others), which all appear to refer to ‘the same’ English regardless of where it’s used, and to suggest that multilingualism with English dates from this E-acronyms era. And a label like ‘Old English’, which refers to the mix of languages used in Britain from the Anglo-Saxon settlement to the Norman invasion, seems to imply that this same language is only somewhat younger nowadays.

The facts are that English was, and continues to be, a product of multilingualism: it emerged as a creole through language contact, and has thrived by means of thriving multilingualism to keep itself in good working order, wherever and whenever it has been used. The history of Latin, the lingua franca of its time, confirms that barring language contact, no language can aspire to cater to a ‘global’ clientele: two of my favourite examples are the collection of manuscripts known as Carmina Burana, part of which Carl Orff immortalised in a musical piece of the same name, and the Finland-based news service Nuntii Latini.

No language is an island, in other words, as John Donne might have put it. Against the myth that (some) languages, whatever name we choose to call them by, sail monolingually unscathed through space and time, a look at historical records documenting our linguistic uses offers excellent evidence that multilingualism through language contact has been the rule, rather than exceptional. In their book Code-Switching in Early English, Herbert Schendl and Laura Wright report that language mixes abound in poems, letters, sermons, charters, as well as in medical, science and everyday texts, and that this is so for the good reason that language switches signal one way of reaching out to the people who matter to us. This, incidentally, is something that children who are raised multilingually learn to do from the outset, as I’ve noted before. Early multilingualism in Britain was also the topic of a conference, promoted by the Magdalene Society of Medievalists, addressing “the mainstream trilingual culture of England”. Doesn’t the collocation of these three words, mainstream, trilingual and England look exciting, nowadays?

Multilingualism has ruled elsewhere, too, of course. We may not know about those who don’t make it to historical records, but they couldn’t have gone on pilgrimages, say, or taken part in conquest and marketing sprees which, still today, keep so many of us so busy, without linguistic ways of feeding and transporting themselves beyond the humdrum ones back home. In The Tragedy of the Templars, for example, Michael Haag quotes The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres, where the author marvels:

“But who ever heard such a mixture of languages in one army? There were Franks, Flemish, Frisians, Gauls, Allobroges, Lotharingians, Alemanni, Bavarians, Normans, Angles, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Dacians, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians. If a Breton or Teuton questioned me, I would not know how to answer either. But though we spoke diverse languages, we [...] seemed to be nearest kin.”

Fulcher hadn’t perhaps been familiar with the military forces of earlier multilinguals such as the Polyglots in Roman Antiquity, as studied by Christian Laes, but he might as well be describing, mutatis mutandis, the linguistic composition of modern armies and the multilingual strategies required to coordinate them.

So what else is new? Not the terminological mess pervading research on multilingualism, which Schendl and Wright also note in their book. My own academic publications, this blog included, show how (un)intentional imprecision blinds us to what multilinguals do and have done with their languages. Calling past instances of multilingual productions ‘macaronic’ or current ones ‘mixed’, for example, makes it look like we’re talking about two different things. Attitudes from users of empowered languages aren’t new, either. Michael Haag further reports Fulcher’s observation that “the Franks learned the local languages, which meant Greek, Armenian, Syriac and Arabic; this stood in contrast to the Arabs and the Turks, for whom there is very little evidence that they could speak the others’ language or troubled to learn the languages of the people they had conquered and oppressed.”

We have, in short, been there and done that, as far as multilingualism is concerned: so much for our ‘increasingly’ multilingual world. History matters, so we don’t waste time and resources mistaking things for our newfound awareness of them. Multilingualism needs no attention as a ‘novelty’, whereas the misconceptions which keep blurring our understanding of it certainly do. The next post has more on this.

Saturday, 18 April 2015

Those of us who were brought up in
monolingual homes may feel rather unsettled about how to deal with
little multilinguals in the family. This is the case even if we are
multilinguals ourselves, because the key words here are bring up
and home: it’s one thing to be multilingual, and quite
another to nurture multilingual children.

One common reason driving parents to
raise their children multilingually relates to the languages used by
each parent, and so to the languages that are relevant to each side
of the family. Parents are likely to want their children to be able
to talk to grandparents, little cousins, and other big and small
relatives and friends in those relatives and friends’ own
language(s), which may well be a single one, thereby adding the benefit of engaging relatives and friends in the process of making the
children theirs, too.

This means nurturing children to feel
at home in distinct linguistic and cultural environments. Although
there is no fundamental difference between doing this and raising
children to become linguistically and culturally appropriate in
distinct monolingual environments,
as all parents do, many of us remain persuaded that we’re
navigating uncharted waters as soon as we start using multi- (or bi-)
prefixed words to refer to behaviours and uses of language, on the
belief that only such words refer to ‘diversity’.
On the related belief that multilingual/bilingual children must
therefore remain forever partial strangers to each ‘mono-’ side
of a mixed family, well-meaning relatives and friends will scrutinise
the children’s linguistic and cultural behaviour for evidence
supporting this belief – and will, naturally, find it.

Words that “all other children know”
are missing, whereas the words that these children do know are used
and pronounced in funny ways. The multilingual nature of the
children’s linguistic creativity, language play,
child-speak,
or plain, typical, nonsensical child gibberish, turns to evidence of
fluency in “other” languages, which “our” language
conspicuously lacks. Whatever the children do, or do not do, in
short, fails to match standard behaviour associated with the monolinguals in the family.
And, of course, any perceived deviation in the children’s ways of
expressing themselves is immediately attributed to their ‘multi-’ status:
the children’s desired well-being (read: conformity to familiar
mono-prefixed standards) is being threatened by their parents’
bizarre (read: multi-) linguistic choices.

The colourful variety of opinions on
raising children in any family, pitting mums against dads, parents
against grandparents, and so on, finds itself compounded in
multilingual families, particularly where the languages and customs
of each side are mutually unintelligible. Sharing a grandchild (or
cousin, or friend) with ‘foreigners’ and their
Foreign-Speak may feel like an intrusion on ourterritorial rights to people,
spawning anything from bewilderment to mild conspiracy theories. In
my family, for example, we had Swedish relatives gape in awe at their
realisation that our toddlers could inflect Portuguese verbs (see
Chapter 7 of my book Three is a Crowd?
for more on this): “They must be so gifted for languages,
everyone knows how difficult Portuguese inflections are!”, with no
mention of the equally ‘difficult’ Swedish inflections that the
children were also producing at the same ages. And we had Portuguese
relatives frown at me when I failed to react to the children’s
addressing, in English, a slice of bolo inglês (which
translates properly as ‘fruit cake’, though literally as ‘English
cake’) on their plate: “Why don’t you tell them to speak
Portuguese in Portugal?”

Both sides of the family winced, in
other words, at the suspicion that their own flesh and blood might
well belong to alien hordes instead.

“Do you really mean to force the poor
things to speak so many languages?” or “Shouldn’t you have a
doctor check out their gobbledygook?” became standard questions to
us parents. They were asked with unmistakable signs of distress,
often in the presence of the gobbledygook-speakers themselves, and
apparently with no thought of how adult uneasiness might reflect on
the children’s behaviour, thus self-fulfilling the expectation of
‘strangeness’.

Concerns such as these appear to me to
draw on subtractive conceptions of multilingualism, where different
languages compete in a zero-sum game, and where, therefore, more than
one language doesn’t mean ‘more than one language’ but ‘many partial languages’.
Multilingual children naturally mix
both their languages and their cultures, but mixes are taken are
evidence of gaps in particular languages, rather than the token of healthy multilingualism
that they are.

Parents must of course use some
language to rear their children. If we stop to think for a while that
multilingualism is as typical
as monolingualism, rather than a manifestation of linguistic
‘otherness’, we’re likely to conclude that, really, what could
be more natural than using with our children the languages that matter
to our respective families? There are no aliens descending on any of
us after all: raising multilingual children in traditionally
monolingual environments is simply a different way of being
different in those environments. Differences of this kind may
sometimes feel overwhelming, because so many of us have been
persuaded that being multilingual is a headline-deserving novelty.
But is it? That’s what I ask next time.

Saturday, 21 March 2015

Popular lore has it that children who
are raised multilingually confuse their languages. One piece of
presumed evidence for this belief comes from the fact that such
children mix their languages.

Mixing languages is indeed typical of multilinguals,
of all ages: if using words (or grammar) of one language in another
were a sign of linguistic or mental disarray, probably in need of
therapeutic correction,
we would need to conclude that users of at least all major world
languages are potential clinical cases. Those languages are
historically mixed,
made up and being made up of bits and pieces from other languages
which, in turn, borrowed and keep borrowing bits and pieces from
them. Just like their users, languages need to adapt in order to
survive, because they’re there to serve those users.

The myth that linguistic mixes ‘mean’
language confusion confuses facts with interpretations – besides
indulging in common causality fallacies.
Child mixes can just as well provide evidence of early awareness of
distinct languages, as shown in a study that I carried out on my own
children’s trilingual language development, Three is a Crowd?.
One of their differentiation strategies involved slotting together
languages and language users,
for example by asking who speaks what (including newborn babies),
on the sensible assumption that languages are there for
people, and because of them. Another favourite strategy, which
I called Turn-to-stare, assisted them whenever words in one of
their languages for some reason failed them:
they mixed words of another language, turning to face ‘rightful’
users of that language as they switched to it, so as to engage them
in the exchange. It’s of course up to us analysts to then choose to
account for similar behaviours in terms of linguisticconfusion
or of linguistic appropriateness.

Propriety
appeared in fact to rank quite high among the children’s
expectations, once the users’ linguistic property rights, as it
were, became clear to them. Establishing who has the right to say
what is an important sociolinguistic skill that must be acquired: all
of us, monolinguals or multilinguals, learn that different uses of
language(s) fit different situations, as
different people do, too. Assigning distinct territories to languages
in this way also matches nicely small children’s keen sense of
property. Just like my children knew very well which toy
belonged to which sibling, they became quite intolerant of what they
must have perceived as breach of language ‘copyright’. This
could happen within each of their languages, when they would, say,
tell me off for using Portuguese words and expressions which they
strongly associated with other Portuguese speakers: they would frown
and fall silent or, later, respond with something to the effect that
“Mummy doesn’t say so, uncle does”. This could also happen
across their languages, when parental word choice or accent in
another language deviated from the standard they associated with
other users of that language.

Telling
parents off for linguistic shortcomings was in fact a favourite child
pursuit in our home, particularly when one parent used the language
of the other. It came complete with explicit apologies to the
presumedly offended receivers, ranging from asserting that “Mum
can’t speak Swedish” when I was
speaking Swedish, to nodding a patronising “He’s Swedish”
towards shop assistants in Portugal, upon dad’s completion of a
transaction in Portuguese. They, the children, were the ‘proper’ users
of each of their languages, and were therefore entitled to judge
because they knew best. Perhaps we can witness here the
(?spontaneous) emergence of linguistic bigotry
among fellow human beings?

Responses
such as these to perceived ‘wrong’ uses of language may well
follow from a broader sense of wrongness. One of the children’s
most profound disenchantments related to their realisation that their
beloved cartoon videos, in Swedish or in Portuguese, were actually
dubbed from English-language originals. They felt duped: they had
been enjoying something in a language which isn’t its,
and they then wondered whether that wasn’t the case, too, for
everything else that they had ever watched, or read, or listened to,
or been told. Another interesting episode relating to those videos is
here.
(An immediate consequence of all this was heavy on the family
finances, by the way: we had to invest in a brand new collection of
the same videos, in English.) Simply hearing the ‘wrong’ language
from any speaker could in fact trigger quite strong adverse reactions
at a very early age,
as well as later on: when we parents found it necessary to switch
from one of the home languages to a school language in order to
assist with homework,
it took quite a lot of cajoling to make the children stop cringing
and wailing “Don’t speak that to me!”.

The
children were well aware that different languages serve different
topics (skiing, for example, was consistently discussed among
themselves in Swedish) but, to them, language-topic bonds were
apparently weaker than language-people bonds – the extreme form of
which is found in ‘one person-one language’
prescriptivism, as I discuss in a podcast, Addressing common misconceptions about multilinguals.
Their own bond to their languages shows from their early linguistic
practices, in interactions involving, say, me and Swedish relatives
or friends: they would use Portuguese to me, as usual, but they would
translate the gist of our exchanges for those whom they knew didn’t
understand Portuguese.

Translating
and switching
languages as needed, for the sake of fellow participants in
linguistic exchanges, are part and parcel of being multilingual,
though often misconstrued as ‘special’ skills. Next time, I’ll
have a look at other feelings of ‘strangeness’ that little
multilinguals tend to arouse.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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